venticool is the international ventilative cooling platform launched in October 2012 to accelerate the uptake of ventilative cooling  by raising awareness, sharing experience and steering research and development efforts in the field of ventilative cooling. In 2020, venticool decided to broaden its scope towards resilient ventilative cooling.

The platform supports better guidance for the appropriate implementation of resilient ventilative cooling strategies as well as adequate credit for such strategies in building regulations.

The platform philosophy is to pull resources together and to avoid duplicating efforts to maximize the impact of existing and new initiatives. venticool joins forces with international projects (in particular IEA EBC annexes 62 (ventilative cooling) and, more recently, annex 80 (Resilient cooling for buildings)) and organizations with significant experience and/or well identified in the field of ventilation and thermal comfort like AIVC (www.aivc.org) and REHVA (www.rehva.eu).

The platform has been initiated by INIVE EEIG with (International Network for Information on Ventilation and Energy Performance) with the financial and/or technical support of its partners.

Ventilative cooling as part of a resilient cooling strategy

Ventilative cooling is a key element in a strategy for sustainable summer comfort. However, its effectiveness is very low if not combined with a good overall building design and solar control. Moreover, in a context of climate change and in increased use of renewables and heat pumps, smart combinations of good building design, passive cooling and high efficiency active cooling concepts could result in sustainable and resilient strategies providing high levels of comfort. In line with the scope of IEA EBC annex 80, the venticool platform has broadened its field of attention to include these other aspects while of course keeping a strong focus on the contribution of ventilative cooling.

Ventilative cooling in energy performance legislations

Because of their increasing weight on building design options, energy performance regulations have undoubtedly are key market drivers. This is a specific concern for ventilative cooling strategies as they require rather mature assessment methods for thermal comfort and ventilation losses to be correctly accounted for.

In fact, adequate credit for ventilative cooling should account for thermal comfort criteria as well as ideally, indoor air quality, visual comfort, and noise. It should reflect the effective cooling potential which greatly varies within a single day, calling for rather sophisticated calculations seldom used in regulations. The good news is that CEN and ISO have ongoing activities for a better assessment of ventilative cooling.